Beixi Li

I scan their faces and remember I’m tired. Trying to engage everyone is like trying to keep a frat house clean. Blond girl hasn’t said anything for the last five minutes. Brunette has been talking non-stop. Asian kid is trying to physically stare me down. Little girl in the back is looking everywhere except for at whoever’s speaking.

 

The group gradually migrates on to their next victim, and squeezing my way through the impossibly dense crowd, making faces along the way, is the new British friend I made 5 minutes ago. A friend of a friend, he’s lucky enough to catch us at this crowning moment, surrounded by nervous rushes, shaking sweaty hands, eating cold pizza or lack thereof. Considering his complete alienation and disinterest from the process, he’s handling it well. After finally squeezing past the closest rush, he plops into the negligible space next to me and shrugs his lean frame in to avoid bumping anyone around him.

Grinning ear to ear he points at his nametag, “Do you like it?”

I peer at the chicken scrawl of a nametag and make out, Chuck, Tim’s Friend.

He’s too hopeful, and I can’t grudge him a laugh, but as he opens his mouth to discuss his ingenuity further, another deer in the headlights rush plucks up his courage and starts talking millimeters from my face.

As I answer the same questions all over again, I glance at Chuck out of the corner of my eye. He’s nodding his head in all the right places, trying to follow the conversation, and I find myself smiling a little too widely as I turn back to the rush who’s now telling me he used to be captain of his soccer team.

As this forlorn captain of a team plods away, Chuck swings in front of me, sticks out his hand, and launches into an exaggerated speech.

“Okay, my dream is to get into Ross.” He waves his hands in flourishing gestures and bounces from foot to foot, “And you guys are just great, and, like, I’m great too. And I was president of—everything…because yeah. And I wanna work at a hedge fund.” He pauses to catch his breath, dusts off the nonexistent dust on his shirt, and ends with, “Oh and I love Goldman Sachs.”

I try to look insulted. But who am I kidding, and the next moment we’re laughing hysterically in a room where everyone else is at most fake laughing. We’re dignified. We’re leaders and the best. We are the next CEOs, the next Steve Jobs, the next corporate bull. We are college students crammed into a too small house, eating bad pizza, drinking flat soda, judging other people.

“What do you think of all this?” My words are instantly grabbed and absorbed by the murmur of the crowd around us.

He cocks his head, thinks a little, and says, for the first time seriously all night, “It is sort of interesting, because, you hear people trying to sell themselves, and no one really enjoys doing it, or most people don’t.”

But the grin is back the next second and, again, we face the backup ranks of people, selling themselves, down to the last minute of the day.